We were all here when his retirement was announced from a family where he had given decades of his life in service. He sowed his youth and his strength, and then from nowhere the news came, he had been retired. Some of us were shocked. I know I was. I even felt a sense of injustice, as though I knew the man personally.
Then before our eyes, he began to host a non denominational service. It transitioned into a ministry and yesterday they moved into their own space.
Bishop David Abioye.
In all of this, not once did he openly speak of what transpired in his former church. No outbursts. No speeches. No tantrums, all of which would have been human. He handled it all with rare grace and uncommon dignity.
He could have gathered sympathisers and built a narrative of injury. In our environment, that would have been easy capital. Nigerians do not just support wounded people, we canonise them overnight.
But he chose silence.
Many people only discover their true calling/purpose when disappointment happens to them. Before then, doctrine is theory, titles are comfort, loyalty is convenient. The real test of a man is not how he behaves when he is announced, celebrated and seated on the altar, it is how he behaves when the chair is quietly removed. What most people do at such times is reinterpret their past to protect their pride.
This man did not.
Instead, he returned to first principles: gather people, pray, teach, worship, start again. No bitterness-induced press conference, no coded interviews, no loyalists sent to fight on social media battlefields. Just work. Clean, silent work.
This is why I call him the Patron Saint of the Used and Dumped.
I doubt he himself ever felt used and dumped. But it is the way I, and I am sure many others, perceived it. And many people are quietly living that story – people who gave the best of their years to an organisation and were replaced by an email; political appointees who defended a government until the day the reappointment list came out and their names were missing; friends who carried relationships until seasons changed and the phone stopped ringing; associates who helped build platforms they were never invited to stand on. The story is common and painfully familiar.
And most people do not break from the event, they break from humiliation or a feeling of it.
And here was this man giving a masterclass not only in emotional governance, but in character. Glory!
I reflected on this public season of his life and took away three lessons:
1. I will never mortgage my future to a moment of pain. My gaze will be on the bigger picture.
2. I will never make yesterday’s platform the ceiling of tomorrow’s purpose.
3. I will never poison my own well just to prove I have been hurt.
In the end, dignity is not what people give you when they honour you. It is what you protect when they do not. Because a man (or woman) may be removed from a seat, but he is not removed from his calling unless he abandons it himself.
For everyone who has ever felt discarded by a system they helped build, here is the uncomfortable truth, your usefulness did not end where your access ended. Sometimes God does not end your work. He only changes your location.
And for those still labouring in another’s field, give it your all. You reap what you sow, not necessarily where.
May the Lord bless the works of our hands and our good intentions.
